Iraq is facing a serious challenge to future growth due to limited water resources. It shares the Euphrates and Tigris with Turkey and Syria who rely on the rivers for irrigation and hydropower. It will be interesting to see if these three nations can come to some sort of agreement on sharing the water. However, the likelihood that Turkey and Syria will increase the amount of water released downstream is slim.

Basra’s Shat al-Arab Canal project’s corner stone laid
December 2, 2010 - 03:44:18
BAGHDAD / Aswat al-Iraq: The corner stone for a 350 billion (b) dinar Shat al-Arab Canal project, aimed at pumping pure water for Basra Province and irrigation water for 250,000 donums of agricultural lands, had been laid down by the Ministry of Water Resources on Thursday.
“The Irrigation Ministry has celebrated today (Thursday), under the auspices of its Minister, Abdul-Latif Jamal Rashid, the laying of the corner stone for Shat al-Arab Irrigation project in Basra Province, as part of an agricultural initiative by the Iraqi government,” an Irrigation Ministry statement said.
Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, had launched a general initiative to raise the agricultural states in the country in July, 2007, with a 10-year plan to achieve self-sustainability from “strategic crops.”
The initiative comprised, among other goals, supplying farmers with seeds, fertilizers, agricultural insecticides, as well as lands reforms and guaranteeing the purchase of their so-called “strategic crops,” with market prices, along with the observation of agricultural and animal diseases and granting financial assistance for peasants and farmers.

__________________
Sumer and Akkad is not Iraq. Independence for Sumeria.

BAGHDAD (AFP) – Record low water levels at Iraq's largest hydroelectric dam have ground turbines there to a halt, amplifying a power shortage that led to riots last summer, a top official said on Thursday.
Adel Mahdi, advisor to the electricity minister, said water levels at the Mosul dam on the Tigris River had fallen to 298 metres (977 feet) above sea level.
"It is the first time since 1984 when the dam was built that water levels have fallen this low," Mahdi told AFP.
"The installed power generation capacity of Mosul's hydroelectric plant is 1,175 megawatts, but the current production is zero, because the turbines need a minimum water level of 307 metres (1,007 feet) to operate," he added.
He said half of the water to the dam was coming from Turkey, and the rest from Iran and the mountains of Iraq.
The Tigris and Euphrates which gave Iraq its ancient name of Mesopotamia, meaning "land of two rivers," reach Iraq through Turkey.
The Tigris flows directly from Turkey, and the Euphrates goes from Turkey through Syria, then flows to Iraq. Water projects in the two countries have had a severe impact on Iraq.
Mahdi said Iraq also was eyeing with extreme worry Turkey's controversial Aliso dam on the Tigris, work on which began in 2006.
"If Aliso is completed, it will finish with the Tigris in Iraq completely," Mahdi said.
Mahdi said hydropower from Iraq's Haditha dam on the Euphrates was also operating at less than 50 percent of capacity because of water shortages due to irrigation and dam projects in Turkey.
He added that Iraqis will have to endure power outages next summer as well, because additional supply would be matched by an expected 10 percent rise in demand, leaving Iraqis with an average of eight hours of power per day.
Mahdi said the situation would not improve before 2013, when projects in the pipeline now would add another 10,000 megawatts to the grid.
He put overall Iraqi electricity demand at 15,000 megawatts, and supply at 8,500 megawatts.
Due to the shortfall, homes and businesses nationwide suffer daily cuts and rely on private generators to fill the gap, as the war-ravaged country struggles to boost capacity.
Angry Iraqis staged violent demonstrations last summer in several southern cities over power rationing as temperatures reached 54 degrees Celsius (130 degrees Fahrenheit).
Iraq's infrastructure was devastated during the 2003 US-led invasion and more than a decade of sanctions that preceded it.

__________________
Sumer and Akkad is not Iraq. Independence for Sumeria.

As much as i agree with you, the problem is our fault and not our neighbours, its inevitable they would use us but we need to be the smart ones and take charge, sadly that will take a long with the majority of the Iraqi mentality.

__________________

"I got bored of my previous signature, so this will have to do until i find a fancy quote"

More than anywhere else, exports from the southeastern Turkish province of Gaziantep and a number of its neighboring provinces are currently being sent to Iraq, according to data recently announced by a Turkish exporters’ union.

Iraq is currently receiving 46 percent of exports, worth of a total of $5.2 billion, produced in the regional provinces last year, the Southeast Anatolia Exporters’ Union, or GAİB told Anatolia news agency.

Iraq also took the top spot in GAİB’s 2009 exports list, while the combined regional cities’ exports to Iraq were worth $2.4 billion in 2010.

Gaziantep and its neighbors exported 2.5 times more goods to Iraq than they exported to a combined 26 European Union countries, according to the data. Regional exports to the same EU countries totaled $985.8 million in 2010.

Exports from Turkey’s southeast to the EU increased by 19 percent in 2010, compared to a year earlier, significantly lower than 43 percent increase in the amount of goods traveling to Iraq.

The main exports to Iraq from the southeastern region in 2010 included $681 million worth of textile products and raw materials, $98.9 million worth of machine-made carpet, $10 million worth of dried fruit and goods, $582 million worth of cereals and pulse and $37.3 million worth of animal products.

South Eastern Turkey's using more water for farming / industrial use that they export to Iraq! Solution, as i said before, is very simple. Do not buy any produce that uses water from any of the upstream countries along the euphrates/tigris basin.

__________________
Sumer and Akkad is not Iraq. Independence for Sumeria.

South Eastern Turkey's using more water for farming / industrial use that they export to Iraq! Solution, as i said before, is very simple. Do not buy any produce that uses water from any of the upstream countries along the euphrates/tigris basin.

GENEVA — A report for the Swiss and Swedish governments warned on Thursday that water shortages in the Middle East were so alarming that opposing camps in the region would have little choice but to cooperate.

Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey called for closer cooperation between Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the Palestinians and Israel on managing increasingly scarce water resources, arguing that water could also be used to forge a "blue peace."

"The report comes to an alarming conclusion; five of the seven countries are experiencing a structural shortage and debit of most of the big rivers has declined by 50 to 90 percent between 1960," she told journalists.

"In the future the main geopolitical resource in the Middle East will be water more than oil," she added, warning that it was closely tied to peace efforts.

The report by an Indian thinktank, Strategic Foresight Group, highlighted huge depletion of major rivers such as the Jordan and Yarmouk in the past half a century, the punctual depletion of the Euphrates by drought and the shrinkage of the Dead Sea to a small lake by 2050.

However, the report also acknowledged the difference between the countries, with upstream Turkey in a position to "influence prospects of peace" despite the collapse of 1980s plan to pipe water to Israel and Gulf states.

Downstream territories such as Israel, Jordan and Palestinian territories were in the worst position with mounting clean water deficits of up to 500-700 million cubic metres each.

The report also argued that technical solutions such as desalination or wastewater recycling in Israel would ultimately have limited scope.

"Purely unilateral solutions will mainly work for a decade or so but Israel will have to look for external sources and regional cooperation beyond 2020 to ensure its water security," it said.

Swiss diplomats said they had already started to lobby the seven governments for a joint water cooperation council expanding on an nascent Turkish, Iraqi, Jordanian and Syrian effort, as well as other steps, even if they admitted that it would be challenging.

My major in college was water resources, hence my interest in this thread. Here are some silly ideas that someone in Iraq has probably already thought of.

In the world of water resources there is the "water-energy nexus." It basically states that it takes energy to make water and vice versa. A lot of articles mention the poor state of Iraq's water and electricity infrastructure. Iraqi's need electricity to produce and deliver safe drinking water yet they need water to produce the electricity.

Like most other nations, Iraq's agriculture sectors is the largest net consumer of the nation's water resources. Due to embargoes and war, investment in Iraq's agriculture sector has been limited. Chances are most of the farmers rely on poorly built and maintained irrigation systems to distribute water via flood irrigation, resulting in massive loss of water to leakage. New irrigation technologies like drip irrigation use a only a fraction of the water as flood irrigation (and is more efficient at distributing fertilizer but that is a different topic). This means more water is available for users downstream and also for Iraqi farmers to increase production.

When a city takes water from a river, it must first treat it to make it safe. However, water quality decrease further downstream as sewage and agriculture runoff enters the stream. This results in greater costs to treat the water. Also dependent on river are power plants. Overall consumption can be reduced if treated wastewater (treated but not up to drinking standards) is used for cooling thermal power plants.

Another huge investment will need to be municipal water distribution networks. Many major American cities are guilty of wasting +20% of their water to leaking pipes, imagine the state of those in Baghdad.

There is also the remote possibility of constructing a desalination plant, maybe in conjunction with Kuwait, for Basra.

Last but not least is Turkey. It would be great if Iraq can make an arrangement with Turkey that ensures a certain percentage will reach the border. However, the issue with international water compacts is that little can be done to enforce them. We (the US) have agreements with Mexico and Canada. The Rio Grande River, or the Rio Bravo as out friends to the south call it, usually resembles a creek because most of its tributaries are in Mexico (and New Mexico) and do not contribute water. American farmers can complain that they are not able to access water they are legally entitled to but there is little they can do.

Anyone know what is going on in the picture? That is the Tigris in Baghdad.

yes I'm almost sure that's the Tigris

the water shortage problem is more than just economical for Iraq.. it is also cultural, it's part of our identity, for thousands of years our region is known as Mesopotamia (the land between two rivers). Our folklore, and heritage often involve the Euphrates and the Tigris.. It's like talking about Egypt and the Nile,

It's no surprise that Iraqis feel extremely passionate about this issue. , perhaps more than our neighbors.

MUTHANNA / Aswat al-Iraq: Minister of Municipalities & Public Works Adil Mihawder on Thursday inaugurated a sewage water treatment plant in the province of al-Muthanna, adding the plant and another water desalination project cost 160 billion Iraqi dinars.

“The plant should filter the sanitary sewage water coming from al-Samawa network after the completion of a project to stretch the networks in the city, expected to be finalized within months,” Mihawder, who is on a visit to Muthanna since Wednesday (March 9), said during the inauguration ceremony.

“The greater Samawa water project, referred for implementation at a total cost of 129.500 billion dinars, will operate at a capacity of 10,000 cubic meter per hour, which should secure the province’s drinking water needs,” he said.

“The plant envisages eight operational facilities to filter and recycle sewage water, three pumping stations, five service buildings and three lodges for engineers working on the project.
The total cost of this project exceeded 31.400 billion dinars,” the minister told Aswat al-Iraq news agency.

He noted that the project’s capacity is 32,000 cubic meters per day.
“The project, targeting the service of 128,000 local residents, stands over an area of 120 donums (300 square kilometers).”

One Iraqi donum equals 2500 square meters.

“The project would recycle sanitary sewage water to use in agriculture and also produce organic fertilizers,” he said.

Samawa, the capital city of al-Muthanna province, lies 280 km south of Baghdad.

AmR (TS)

__________________

“Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless”

-

<<VISIT To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.,ARAB CAPITAL OF CULTURE 2013>>

-

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.